He also served over thirty years as an attorney and judge, and assisted Thurgood Marshall in the Brown v. Board of Education case.
The state paid tuition for Davis to attend a school out of state to avoid having him in a classroom with white students, but when Davis realized the higher cost of living at Howard University in Washington, D.C. far outweighed the cost of tuition, he insisted on applying to U of A.
In 1947, after applying to the University of Arkansas Law School for two years, he was granted admission under the circumstance that he would not be allowed to enter a room with white students in it, including classrooms, the library and the restrooms.
In 1959, in Flax v. Potts, he won a suit forcing the Fort Worth schools to integrate.
[2] In 2017, at age 92, the University of Arkansas School of Law granted him an honorary doctorate, in place of the one he was denied in 1949.